Contents

Features

Installation

Since kernel 2.6.19 nearly all Nova-T sticks are recognized correctly. So if you just plug in your Nova-T Stick and run dmesg you should see something like this:

usb 2-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
usb 2-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
dvb-usb: found a 'Hauppauge Nova-T Stick' in cold state, will try to load a firmware
dvb-usb: did not find the firmware file. (dvb-usb-dib0700-01.fw) Please see linux/Documentation/dvb/ for more details on firmware-problems. (-2)

Depending on your box number (e.g 293) or device no. (e.g 70009) the kernel may require the firmware version to be dvb-usb-dib0700-01.fw. So either you just rename the firmware linked above or put a link. That's up to you. Both seem to work fine.

If this is done just plug in the usb stick again and see what happens. The output of dmesg is supposed to look like that.

Configuration

User permissions

In order to have access to our usb stick as a normal user you'll have to add you to the video group. Run this command as root:

gpasswd -a USER video

Replace USER with the name of the user which you want to grant access. Afterwards either reboot or relogin.

Getting channels

Now that we have setup our usb stick and it's working fine, let's scan for channels. Therefore I recommend the linuxtv-dvb-apps package which you can find in the community repository.

pacman -S linuxtv-dvb-apps

Also we need a so called initial scan file. This file is needed for scan to work properly. It provides a frequency that scan is going to use as a starting point from which it'll proceed with its scan. These files are specific to your geographic location and have the form of cc-Ttttt, where cc is a two-letter country abbreviation, and Ttttt is the name of the location of the transmitter. You'll find a lot of scan files in the official dvb-apps repository.

If you can't find a suitable initial scan file then you can build your own with w_scan (AUR).

w_scan -x > cc-Ttttt

So for example in Leipzig, Germany, you'd look for a file called de-Leipzig.

scan de-Leipzig > leipzig.conf

After a few seconds the scan has finished and all found channels have been written into our leipzig.conf.

Watch TV

Now there are a lot of ways to watch TV, for example with Kaffeine, xine, mplayer, VLC and so on. Also some of these programs provide EPG, Time shafting and things like that.

A fast way is to just open your leipzig.conf with VLC and enjoy watching!